(i) Technical Field
The present invention relates to an image forming apparatus and method, a non-transitory computer readable medium, and an image forming system.
(ii) Related Art
Existing print services are generally on-premises services installed at individual organizations (such as companies and schools). Because an on-premises print service (server) is a closed system for each organization, user identification information (ID) (such as an employee number) unique to that organization may be used as it is as a user account. Therefore, security printing and aggregation management of print jobs may be easily performed using user IDs unique to each organization.
In contrast, cloud print services provided on the Internet, such as Google Cloud Print developed by Google, have been proposed in recent years. A user at a personal computer (PC) or the like logs in to a cloud print service with a user ID for that service, and, after the user logs in, the user sends print data to the cloud print service. The print data is printed by providing the print data from the cloud print service to an image forming apparatus via the Internet or the like.
Unlike on-premises services, cloud print services are shared among plural organizations or individuals, and each cloud print service allocates user IDs independent of the individual organizations. Because users may not be able to obtain, as their user IDs for the cloud print services, the same user IDs as those in their organizations, user IDs used for user authentication in the cloud print services do not generally coincide with user IDs that are given in and unique to the individual organizations. A cloud print service knows a user ID for that service with regard to print data, but does not know a user ID unique to each organization. Therefore, when print data is provided from a cloud print service to an image forming apparatus and is printed with the image forming apparatus, the image forming apparatus is unable to apply security printing or aggregation management regarding that print data on the basis of the user ID unique to the organization.